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Beginners question, is there a reason we can’t reverse engineer something similar for lights made by Govee? Is it because it’s WiFi and harder to MITM?

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I have a couple of Govee light bulbs in my garage I control with an M5StickC using BLE: https://github.com/stevenjohnstone/reversing-tools/blob/main... . Looking at the decompiled Govee android app, there are many products with similar control over BLE in addition to wifi.

There may be an easier way, but another HN thread pointed out that you can use tailscale to make it easier to tcpdump phone apps (because you can send all of the phone traffic through an endpoint you control.) (Presumably raw wireguard is enough? I haven't tried (or seen tutorials for) either approach, it was just a "that sounds clever, save it for my next sniffer project" idea)

https://mitmproxy.org/

Whoa that’s an interesting idea, use a tailscale exit node and use tcpdump on the interface

The Govee strips I have do support Bluetooth connectivity. In fact, that’s how they are setup initially.

Your comment prompted me to search for “Govee LAN” and found HomeAssistant LAN integration. Time to dig deeper!

https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/s/bppM4AR3uA

I might need to buy some and try this out, Philips hue pricing has gotten out of hand since covid

I like the form factor of some of the Govee string lights. I’ve thrown out their controller and hooked them to ESP32’s with WLED. Best of both worlds that way.

This sounds amazing, do you use ESPhomr with it?! Any tutorial cause I love this idea

There are a few projects on github for govee lights. On windows I have used https://github.com/ib0b/RGB-PC to connect to mine by bluetooth but the problem is that govee lights can only be connected to one bluetooth device at a time

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